Information Technology and Libraries articles from December 1995

Information Technology and Libraries archives from December 1995

Libraries on the superhighway: rest stop or roadkill?(information superhighway)(Gene Wolfe's address to the Library Information and Technology Association)(Transcript)
December 1, 1995... You see before you a man suckered by his publisher. I thought my wife and I were going to get an expense-account trip to Miami in return for eating dinner and signing a few books. If I had known I was going to have to give this talk, I would...

Institutional circuitry: thinking about the forms and uses of information.
December 1, 1995... We have been asked to speculate upon the future of information, and I would like to begin by funpacking some of the assumptions bound up in this phrase, "the future of information." The word "information" is grammatically a mass noun, like...

Multiply and conquer.(short story)
December 1, 1995... Justin Campbell liked to walk as he thought, especially when weather this warm and sunny came through in the middle of November. And he liked working at Stanford's student health, talking with students about their problems, giving them relaxation...

The elephant and the Net cruiser: regulating communication on the Net.(censorship and the Internet)
December 1, 1995... The Way You Think... "The way you think about things shapes the way your reality is." Ruby Maverick, a character in my novel, Summer of Love, says that when she challenges a far-future time traveler to examine the assumptions underlying his...

The Internet as a commons.
December 1, 1995... Back in the European middle ages, before the enclosures of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, there existed in England and several other kingdoms vast tracts of territory called "common lands." These were fields and pastures which no one...

Problems in information transfer in the age of the computer.
December 1, 1995... Access to information, whether printed, oral, or electronic is basic to the making of choices for living. Yet the complexity of the information world, seemingly inherent restrictions, and the overwhelming amount of information available almost...

Information and unfictionable science.(information science in science fiction)
December 1, 1995... Ever since the Enlightenment, when it became clear that from now on significant change would occur within a single human life span, we have tended to see change as originating more in some parts of society than in others--that is, to see some...

The Matrix, cyberpunk literature, and the apocalyptic landscapes of information technology.
December 1, 1995... Perhaps no theme has so attracted the febrile imaginings of postmodern scholars as the creations--and the technological culture--of cyberpunk literature. Cyberpunk science fiction is "the apotheosis of post-modernism," in one assessment,...

Robots: our future information intermediaries.
December 1, 1995... Your TV wakes you at 7:00 a.m. just as The Today Show comes on. Your eyes aren't even open and in 30 seconds you're caught up on the important world news that you missed while you slept: if Japan didn't get another earthquake... if Israel's...

Intelligent information filters and enhanced reality.
December 1, 1995... I started seriously thinking about the ideas of augmented perception and personalized views of reality after reading a number of Internet messages with proposals to introduce language standards for online communications. Usually people suggest...

The impossible dream.(role of communication technology in the future of mankind)
December 1, 1995... The word "impossible" received new shadings in the 19th century. Three of my favorites: First, from an 1857 essay on poetry by Guissipi Mazzini, "Byron and Goethe": There is no absolute type on earth: the absolute exists in the Divine Idea...